THE NEW LIQUIDITY

Underwater
Cosmologies

Underwater Cosmologies is an ongoing umbrella project created directly in response to the climate crisis, in which we use participatory soundwalks, audio guides and installations, to provoke critical discourse and imaginative possibilities around the future of freshwater and marine ecosystems. By investigating different bodies of water and treating them as deep archives, we want to examine water’s fluid heritage as a place of geo-cultural and human-non-human memory. The project intertwines research from several fields of study: sound and media art, art in public space, the field of locative media and technology, the field of sensory studies and emotional geographies and finally, the field of environmental and sustainability studies.

In ”Water And Dreams” Gaston Bachelard writes that ”water truly is the transitory element. It is the essential, ontological metamorphosis between fire and earth. A being dedicated to water is a being in flux.” Alas, water is the connecting element, the most transitional element as it can exist in solid, fluid and gaseous form. In a time of climate and ecological emergency we keep this project open in terms of practice in order to better be able to react and resonate with the site in question to foster a critical discourse and imaginative possibilities around the current status and future of the marine ecosystems at a perilous moment in time. We want to examine water’s fluid ontology and the forms of life it enables, specifically, position water as shared human-non-human heritage and a site of geo-cultural memory, while recognizing that water always comes to us mediated. With this, we adopt the critical apparatus of media theory to think about geology, heritage, history and memory in terms of dynamic processes rather than solid objects. Furthermore, we would like to move beyond the perception of water in its oceanic arrangements only in terms of “fluidity” and to see it also as “a social space”, encapsulating a complex power relations. We would like to address hydromedia as a conceptual tool that will allow us to view cultural practices constitutively entangled with their environments, outlining more fluid post-Anthropocene ethics.

Our research focuses on the awareness of marine worldviews and a deeper understanding of the changes in marine ecosystems management as well as water politics in general. By focusing on story-telling as a method to trace the archives of underwater memory and its corporality we want to ask how we can engage with liquid violence, hydropoetics of displacement, and inland water's forensics. What can we learn about our corporeality from the underwater cosmologies and how can we formulate new ways of fluidity?

Underwater Cosmologies: (more info)

Postcards

from Balaton

4-Channel Audio-Visual
Tactile Installation

Balatorium / Ecology Week / Veszprém European Capital of Culture 2023
Installed at:
• The Limnological Institute/Tihany
• Örvenyes Beach/Örvenyes, Hungary

#Wooden Frames Made of Organically Oil Hardened Flooring Truss Boards, 3D Printed Aquariums, Fresnel Lenses, Android Phones, Battery Driven Amplifiers, Surface Mounted Transducers.

In ’Postcards from Balaton’ The New Liquidity uses recorded material col- lected from different parts of Lake Balaton to create an immersive audio- visual dialogue between the ordered reality humans arrange for themselves to interact with and what actually happens under the surface.

Juxtaposing recorded material from the Balaton reed areas with documentation from night fishing excursions with scientists from the Limnological Insti- tute ’Postcards From Balaton’ plays within a larger discourse of critical tourism to unfold the dichotomy bet- ween the postcard-like vacational history and human settlement around the lake versus the effects on the Balaton eco systems from human intervention and expansion during the last decades.

Using sound as their compositional guide the duo creates an audio-visual feedback loop of how failing eco systems’ tipping points happen in a self-reinforcing accelerative manner, while inevitably being accompanied by biodiversal loss. By exploring aspects of the field of remote sensing within their existing practice The New Liquidity has staged a chain of transducting material in a feedback loop - hydrophone recordings and underwater footage are projected and propagated to the viewer through water from the lake as well as materials used in human settlements to filter or shield their own habitats from the nature they colonise.